„Windows Background.wav“ played by taskhostw.exe when certain programs are opened

Question

OS: Windows 10 Home 1909 x64, OS build 18363.752

Whenever I open the Control Panel, Windows Background.wav plays once the window has appeared. It also occurs¹ for E1 mod:

• upon opening Firefox
• in Microsoft Edge, upon navigating, creating a new window or closing the last remaining window, sometimes upon opening
• the first time I start typing after starting (not opening from background) Discord
• in the Task Scheduler, upon navigating to History -> Details for the first time after opening the program
• upon opening services.msc
• sometimes upon switching to E1 mod
• immediately upon opening Inkscape, again several seconds after

There are no visuals associated with the sound playing such as the task bar icon flashing, and no notifications in the notification center.

I have tried some other programs such as PicPick (a snipping tool), paint.net, the built-in calculator and some others, but I have not experienced it with them.

I have run SFC /scannow and DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth. Both reported no issues and changed nothing. A virus scan using Malwarebytes was also negative.

I also tried Safe Mode (with networking turned off). There, the problem did not occur in Firefox or the Control Panel. At the time I tested Safe Mode, I hadn't figured out the connection to the keyboard layout yet. I also did not test any other programs.
It did, however, occur multiple times upon booting normally again, in addition to the aforementioned triggers.

Another thing I tried is disabling Settings -> System -> Notifications & actions -> Get notifications from apps and other senders, which also changed nothing.

Using procmon, I found taskhostw.exe is running the following sequence of operations multiple times whenever the problem occurs, all with a path value of C:\Windows\Media\Windows Background.wav:

CreateFile
QueryStandardInformationFile
QueryBasicInformationFile
CloseFile

taskhostw does not run in Safe Mode.
This sequence is repeated 8 times for the Control Panel and 16 times for Discord, but the sound plays only once. For Inkscape, a test I did with GER ASCII shows the sequence repeating 656 times, with the sound playing twice. Here is an example procmon log, recorded when opening the Control Panel with E1 mod active, showing only events with paths containing .wav.
I have verified that this is actually C:\Windows\System32\taskhostw.exe. It uses so little CPU that procexp doesn't even draw a graph for it; its „private bytes“ are consistently around 9.7 MB, sometimes increasing to around 10 MB. It appears to only ever perform major I/O when the sound is played, for less than 1/10 sec., spiking at a write of ca. 1 MB at most². Its process tree is as follows:

wininit.exe
└── services.exe
    └── C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe -k netsvcs -p -s Schedule
        └── taskhostw.exe {222A245B-E637-4AE9-A93F-A59CA119A75E}

I was able to find a Microsoft Community post (in German) where taskhostw with the same arguments caused a similar issue, the main difference being that the OP reports the sound playing exactly every 10 minutes, instead of as a result of certain actions. Unfortunately, that thread died almost immediately and has no useful solutions. The OP included a procmon entry that looks similar to the ones I have encountered.
After disabling Task Scheduler -> Microsoft\Windows\WDI\ResolutionHost and rebooting, taskhostw still runs. Also, the last time the Resolution Host task ran was on April 9, which leads me to believe the Resolution Host is not responsible.
I also tried disabling almost every Autoruns entry (with Hide Emtpy Locations, Hide Microsoft Entries and Hide Windows Entries enabled), save for the KnownDlls entries, which can't be disabled.
With all these disabled, taskhostw still ran and the sounds still played.

I have done an in-place upgrade to try and fix the issue, but it remained.

I do not use „Killer Control Center“, which appears to commonly cause similar issues, as suggested by some support threads. I have not found any other useful threads when googling for my issue.

I noticed the issue only occurs when a certain keyboard layout is selected: a version of the DIN standardised E1 layout (article in German) downloaded from here, which I slightly modified and then re-built using MSKLC 1.4. Let's refer to it as „E1 mod“ for the purpose of brevity.
I have used another keyboard layout from the same site before, which appears to be the only place to get the layout I want and is linked to from multiple places on the German Wikipedia, which leads me to believe it is trustworthy. The issue does not occur when using the unedited version („E1“).

I did some testing with MSKLC:

• I recompiled the default German keyboard layout using MSKLC, having modified only the Name, Description, Company and Copyright fields („GER mod“). Here is its source file. I installed it using the setup.exe generated and rebooted. With this layout selected, the issue still occurs, but seemingly less frequently and consistently³.
• Similarly, I created a new layout from scratch, which can only type lowercase English letters and other ASCII characters, but no Unicode characters („GER ASCII“). Every key has been assigned exactly one character and has no defined character when any modifier key is pressed. Here, I could only reproduce the issue with Inkscape³.

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I'll be happy to provide any further infomation helpful for solving my problem.

Thanks very much in advance!

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¹_{consistently every time, except where otherwise specified}

²_{There are also very rarely I/O spikes of <100 KB, as well as spikes so small I can only find them by hovering over the very bottom border of the graph, invisibly small like the CPU usage graph, both seemingly at random.}

³_{It still occurs consistently with Inkscape.}

Answer 1

I've faced with same issue and others like

• Failed to download any files in Firefox
• "Unable to extract 64-bit image. Run Process Explorer from a writable directory." when running Process Explorer, that just worked yesterday
• ... many other problems could arise.

The real reason was that I set a Junction (hard link) for Temp folder when I played with ImDisk. After unmounting the disk I got a broken link.

So deleting the "C:\ProgramData\Temp" (broken junction) fixes all the issues. You don't even need to create it manually since first attempt to write to temp folder will create it.

It seems that the sound notification from taskhostw.exe was caused by unsuccessful attempt to use %TEMP% by different programs.